Thomas Hardy (1840-1928): The Walk from Poems of 1912-1913, in Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries (1914)

I
rode my pretty mare Fanny and he walked by my side and I showed him
some more of the neighbourhood -- the cliffs, along the roads, and
through the scattered hamlets, sometimes gazing down at the solemn small
shores below where the seals lived, coming out of great caverns very
occasionally. We sketched and talked of books: often we walked down the
beautiful Valency Valley to Bodcastle harbour where we had to jump over
stones and climb over a low rail by rough steps, or get through by
narrow pathways to come out on great wide spaces suddenly, with a
sparkling little brook going the same way, into which we once lost a
tiny picnic tumbler, and there it is to this day no doubt between two
small boulders.
-- Emma Hardy: from Some Recollections, ed. Evelyn Hardy and Robert Gittings, 1961Not
till his first wife had died could Hardy's love poetry for her have been
written, and then it was mixed with a flood of regret and remorse for
what he had lost. This kind of paradox is inseparable from poetic
creation, and indeed from life altogether. At times it almost appears a
sort of basic insincerity in human affection. At others it seems a flaw
built deeply into the working of the emotions, creating an inevitable
bias in life towards unhappiness.

11 comments:

"Despite the many years of estrangement and misery, Hardy was devastated by Emma's sudden death in November of 1912. Overwhelmed by immense regret over what their life together had come to and by memories of their early happiness, especially their courting days in Cornwall, he made the long journey to Cornwall in March 1913, an arduous undertaking for a man of seventy-three, and tramped around in the mud and cold of St. Juliot and the cliffs along the coast, seeking out their old trysting places... Hardy regarded [the Poems of 1912-13] an an 'expiation'."

Hardy's regret; I think Larkin's too sharp in talking of "a sort of basic insincerity". I do understand the line of his thinking. Public regret has the feel of theatre. Nevertheless, the gesture may be necessary.

Hardy's poetry during these years has such blinding force, I almost can't bear to read it.

The torsion of the folded rocks at Voter's Run suggested the twisting of the knife of tortured retrospective emotion. There are as many sorts of dominant poetic emotion as there are poets of originality. In Hardy's case, the emotion seems to be rue, a prevailing sadness which seems to go beyond the personal to incorporate something essential in the human condition, the element of failure. There are shades of feeling we understand best, and which are evoked in the greatest particularity, through poetry.

In a radio talk on Hardy's poetry, Larkin, looking back on his own starting-out as a poet, said:

"When I came to Hardy it was with a sense of relief that I didn't have to try and jack myself up to a concept of poetry that lay outside my own life -- this is perhaps what I felt Yeats was trying to make me do. One could simply relapse into one's own life and write from it. Hardy brought one to feel rather than to write -- one of course has to use one's own own language and one's own jargon and one's own situations -- and he taught me as well to have confidence in what I felt I have come, I think, to admire him even more than I did then... In almost every Hardy poem in the 800 pages [of the Collected Poems]... there is a little spinal cord of thought and each has a little tune of its own, and this is something you can say of very few poets."

All the comments and observations and further elucidations by Tom add beautifully to the chord sounded by Hardy—the loss of someone close and dear; the feelings that arise from such a loss perhaps serve to replace or stand in for what is absent: a strange sort of gift, of rue and sadness, but 'an underlying sense,' a connection to the one who is not there, and can never be there again.